Saturday, June 20, 2009

Atheism Doesn’t, Agnosticism Won’t

I am human, so are you – with, of course, the exception of Coco the monkey who may or may not be able to read this. One-hundred and twenty percent of us believe in a Higher Power. That’s right. God. You scoff, scorn and rebuke? Hold a moment.

Firstly, you point out that one-hundred and twenty percent is twenty percent above the whole of humankind. Right-o. True enough. My conjecture comes from the presupposition that twenty percent of the currently living population is deceased. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that all of humanity, past and present, believes(ed) in God. Settled.

Secondly, the crux, the real stumbling block for you – particularly if you suppose yourself atheist or agnostic – is the inflammatory, egregious claim that All believe(d) in God. Fair enough. Let me explain…

Truthfully, I had a concrete line of reasoning that may have been able to explain away atheism and agnosticism as mere epidermal hodge-podge. It was all so clear on a ponderous saunter I had a few hours ago. I guess I waited too long to put down my thoughts. Crap. I suppose it is for the best. This is not a theology blog and I am a rambling buffoon. Back to the basics; what I had for breakfast, weekly running mileage, injury reports, race reports, the occasional anecdote from work, etc. 

I put in close to 60 walking miles this week. It has been feeling pretty good. Great actually. My stride is long and strong. I am in the process of rebuilding my legs. They had whittled down to little more than bone and tendon over the last 16 months of 16+ miles a day. I spend a fair amount of time squatting and lunging, which reads kind of funny. Also, I have been doing a lot of stretching exercises/basic yoga poses, planks, ball crunches, upper-body work with elastic bands and reading. The reading has nothing to do with that set, but I do consider it a part of my nightly work out period, from 4-7. Last week I read “B is for Beer”, “Alone on the Summit” (Everest Kangshung Face 1988), “The Unclimbed Ridge” (Bonington’s Everest foray on the Northest Ridge) and something else. This week, I finished Kurt Vonnegut’s posthumous “Armageddon in Retrospect” and have gotten about halfway through David Breashear’s climbing memoir “High Exposure”. Back to training. I am going to continue these walks, building up my mileage on the weekends and dropping on the weekdays, until July, when I will begin sprinkling jogs into my training. This is all tenative, of course, dependent upon what my legs have to say about each step of the training journey. Alright. Until next time. Peace.

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